Three Points About Socialism-As-I-Understand-It
It used to be that I couldn’t clearly describe exactly what my reasons were for being a socialist. I just acted the way I did, and my underlying beliefs weren’t neatly written out. I came to my way of acting by looking at the injustices in the world, reading theory, organizing with wonderful folks at university, and thinking about what it would take to get from our current world to a better one.
More recently, however, I’ve had conversations with people like my brother and friends about how I would describe socialism. That is, I’ve been forced to explain myself!
It’s good that I’ve had to write this out explicitly, but I also want to be careful so I don’t get stuck in any inflexible or frozen way of thinking. There will always be new situations which demand new analyses and strategies. In those cases, I’ll have to refer back to my basic moral intuitions.
What follows is a slightly edited version of what I talked about with my friends. I texted to the groupchat this:
Oh going back to the highlights of socialism— Maybe it might be easier to explain on a phone call, but for me, there are at least 3 things that I often come back to:
1 - Morally...
Morally, I’m trying to promote an expansive form of democracy, in the sense that:
People have decision-making power over the decisions that affect their lives, to the degree that those decisions affect their life. [1]
And that’s what I’m building toward.
This democratic principle is not simply limited to the government. For example, I think people should have more decision-making power in businesses that affect their community (through pollution, gentrification, whatever). They should also have decision-making power at the places they work (maybe people get to vote on managers; or vote on the exact terms for when someone can be fired, so managers/owners aren't firing people at a whim).
That democratic principle also means that if people set up some authoritarian state in the name of socialism, we’ve failed. [2]
2 - Socialist analysis of capitalism...
In terms of why capitalism isn’t democratic... uhh, here’s some background:
Socialists generally view capitalism as being more than simply the existence of markets. They also consider there to be two economic classes (and this is very simplified):
People who can fully live off of their ownership of property (they own a business, apartment buildings, stocks, or other financial assets which turn out profits or accrue value). If they wanted to, they wouldn’t really have to work throughout their life—they could even hire others to do the paperwork.
People who weren’t born into rich conditions or didn’t get lucky enough to invent or invest in the right thing at the right time. We have to sell our labor to be able to have healthcare and afford other basic things like a roof over our heads and somewhat nutritious food.
(Some ways this is simplified is that there are people in the working class who own property—like they own their own house. But I generally think that if you don’t have the option to live your life fully on your financial assets, then you’re part of the working class. I also think that having a retirement should be a basic need, so if people have stocks in a 401k just for retirement, I still consider them working class.)
Okay, background over—
The imbalance in ‘what people need to do to survive’ creates a power imbalance. Working class people tend to compete with each other for lower wages and benefits—they need food and shelter, and the owners of the businesses can just hire someone else who also needs to work to afford food/shelter.
So working class people, unless they get a really specialized job, are going to be underpaid and exploited because that’s how the labor market works. And the rest of the value that they’re creating for the company goes to the owners in the form of profit, which the owners can reinvest to buy more assets and businesses, and exploit more workers.
The labor market’s power imbalance also forces workers to accept the authoritarian structure of the workplace. Now, sure, owners can tell managers to be nice to workers. But when push comes to shove about the really important things like layoffs, wages, and benefits, it becomes very clear that workers lack meaningful decision-making power. [3]
An important part of socialism-as-democracy, then, is to get rid of the power imbalance between the ownership class and the working class—that is, reaching a point where workers (and their communities) own the means of production. When workers are owners, there is no worker-vs-owner distinction. (This doesn’t mean everything in the workplace has to be a direct democracy—people can set up workplace constitutions, internal voting structures, and have representative hierarchies.)
3 - Socialist strategy...
The strategy I tend to like the most is building democratic structures and institutions in everyday civil society. People get more experience and practice running things democratically. They also hopefully realize that other things in their life aren’t as democratic as they should be, and begin to demand better.
Building that sort of organized people power lets us elect progressive representatives. The laws they change makes it easier to build a more democratic civil society (which in turn makes it easier to elect better people, and so on).
Eventually, we reach a point where it’s considered moral that people ought to have democratic participation, control, and ownership in their workplaces. Just how today, there are moral limits on what I can do with my property (I can’t run someone over with my car); and there are moral limits on workplaces (they can’t employ child labor)—someday I hope we reach a point where the unjust hierarchies of workplaces are broadly seen as immoral.
Some final thoughts.
I consider fighting for basic needs like climate-change mitigation, healthcare, better wages, job guarantees, defunding the police to fund community services, etc. as part of the fight for a democratic society. Those are all basic moral things that I believe in, but those things also let people worry less about surviving, and lets us put more time and effort into democratically living with other people. [4]
Maybe at my most basic, idealistic level, I want people to—as much as possible—be able to support one another because we share a feeling of “We’re all in this together,” and not because “You paid me money and I’ll pay someone else money later, & that’s the reason we do things for other people.” [5]
Footnotes & Extra Bits
I didn’t text these footnotes to my friends, but it’s a bit of stuff if you want some references to how my ideas have been influenced.
[1]
I got this sort of formulation from reading a bit of Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias. His description goes:
“Underlying the analysis in this book is what could be called a radical egalitarian understanding of justice. It rests on two broad normative claims, one concerning the conditions for social justice and the other the conditions for political justice:
“Social justice: In a socially just society, all people would have broadly equal access to the necessary material and social means to live flourishing lives.
“Political justice: In a politically just society, all people would have broadly equal access to the necessary means to participate meaningfully in decisions about things which affect their lives. This includes both the freedom of individuals to make choices that affect their own lives as separate persons, and their capacity to participate in collective decisions which affect their lives as members of a broader community.”
(Wright, 12)
[2]
This section on morality is also influenced by Nathan J. Robinson’s article, ‘Socialism as a Set of Principles’, published in Current Affairs. I think very highly of this article, and I recommend it often.
In it, he says something similar to how Wright describes social justice:
“Everyone should be meaningfully free to have the most fulfilling life possible. ‘Meaningfully’ free means that they need to be able to have that life in reality rather than just in theory: if every child who can afford it can take a trip to Disney World, but some children cannot afford it, then not everyone is free to go to Disney World…” (Robinson)
He also says something similar to what Wright says about political justice:
“The instinct that ‘people should be able to shape their own destinies’ leads socialists to endorse what I think is the core meaning of ‘democracy,’ namely the idea that people should have decision-making power over those things that affect them.” (Robinson)
[3] (I might spin this off into another blog post)
Note: I didn’t include this paragraph in my texts to my friends, but when editing, I thought it was important to add. Even in the supposedly most team-oriented and worker-empowered companies like Google, you see workers angry over their lack of decision-making power over things like: fair wages, how the company handles sexual harassment, and how their work is being used for censorship and war. The profit interest of owners often doesn’t align with what workers are morally comfortable with—but where else can workers go, if even Google is unethical?
[4] (I might spin this off into another blog post)
The things I mention are important things with regard to the distribution of wealth and power. Reforms to the distribution of these things improves people’s lives, and if we were to stop there, we would be like the social democrats of Scandinavia. What sets us socialists apart from social democrats is that we see that the problems of the distribution of wealth and power arise out of the modes of production of wealth and power. It’s not enough to redistribute wealth and democratize power, we need to make the system of production more democratic and emphasizing of solidarity.
Rosa Luxemburg describes in her final chapter of Reform or Revolution this distinction:
“…[B]efore Marx and independently from him, there have been labour movements and various socialist doctrines, each of which, in its way, was the theoretic expression corresponding to the conditions of the time, of the struggle of the working class for emancipation. The theory that consists in basing socialism on the moral notion of justice, on a struggle against the mode of distribution, instead of basing it on a struggle against the mode of production, … were, in their time, in spite of their insufficiency, effective theories of the proletarian class struggle. They were the children’s seven-league boots thanks to which the proletariat learned to walk upon the scene of history.
“But after the development of the class struggle and its reflex in its social conditions had led to the abandonment of these theories and to the elaboration of the principles of scientific socialism, there could be no socialism – at least in Germany – outside of Marxist socialism…”
(Luxemburg)
Luxemburg is emphasizing that Marx’s contribution was to focus the socialist struggle on the capitalist mode of production and class struggle, not merely the distribution of wealth (e.g. issues of wages, healthcare, affordable housing, basic needs). Capitalism incentivizes the owner class to gain power over the working class, and to use their power to erode any distributional reforms—that’s what makes the most profit for owners. We’ve seen how rich capitalists have continuously pushed to privatize public services, or to undercut laws meant to protect the rights of workers. The only way out of this is to abolish the capitalist mode of production.
This way of thinking is similar but more complex with regards to white supremacy, patriarchy, and other social divisions. Like the economic problems of distribution, we can’t solve these through reforms, we need to attack the issues that drive people apart at a basic level. A lot of the underlying problems of social divisions will be closely tied to abolishing certain economic modes of production—slavery arose to serve an economic role, our immigration system and outsourcing serve economic roles, and American-led coups and wars serve economic roles. Even sexism helped the property-owning men maintain their privileges for self-determining their lives and affecting the world that comes with owning property. But economic class struggle alone will not be enough here—we also need to build society on norms of democracy and solidarity which act as a sort of therapy for the fear which drives groups of people to impose social power over other groups.
[5]
While this communal norm feels very idealistic, I take this seriously! It’s an extremely long-term goal for socialists, but a democratic society that is capable of supporting high and continually improving standards of living, alongside such a communal norm—that is the end-goal of communism. Socialism focuses on the fight for a democratic society, with large emphasis on the goal of getting workers and the community to own the means of production.
I owe G.A. Cohen’s essay Why Not Socialism? for helping me realize that this is such an important part of how I feel. Cohen dedicated a lot of space to talk about communal principles, and he emphasized how the coordinating principles of capitalism are based around greed and fear.
If we could choose, we probably wouldn’t want our society to promote greedy or fearful behaviors. Nonetheless, that’s what capitalism does. Even if you’re a kind person, if you want to succeed within capitalism, your actions will most likely be identical to greedy actions. Meanwhile, fear motivates people because they’re worried about having enough to provide for themselves and their family. As much as possible, we shouldn’t want our society to be reliant on making people fearful, or rewarding greedy behavior.
Perhaps the most important foundation for my belief in the norm of community comes from my personal experiences with solidarity and community within organizing. Social connections—and the knowledge that people will have my back because of our social connections—are such huge positive experiences compared to the fear and isolation that characterizes capitalist America. I am convinced at a gut level that communal norms will play an important part in any society that allows people to live their most fulfilled lives.
